Thomas Hauser’s series ‘Amazona, India’ – still lifes of flowers as a symbol of a timeless Memento Mori, arranged in containers of the industrial age like beer, coke bottles and plastic cups, giving a new meaning of the concept of transience as part of the contemporary reality. All elements constituting the image are engaged in a specific kind of dialogue about the moment of mortality: while the topic of natural circle of flowering and decay is on the subject, on the other hand, the material goods that define it would be quite possible that will outlast for centuries.

“Part travel diary and part love letter to the cities of Tokyo and Osaka,Jean-Vincent Simonet’s series ‘In bloom’is a searing, hyper-visual journey into the heart of Japanese underground culture and an ode to the overwhelming experience of seeing a place with the eyes of a stranger for the first time.

For Simonet, Japan has always had an aquatic, almost mythical status. His images – of which all are original analogue photographs – are transformed through experimental manipulations; metaphors for the slow process of feeling ingested by these fluid, mutating organisms. Printing his images onto plastic paper and sculptural resin so the ink never quite dries, Simonet uses water and chemicals, long exposure and torchlight to transform the surface of his prints, abstracting and blurring them as if the scenes are melting away.”

Lynda Laird’s series ‘Dans le Noir’ – Visualizing memory and the sense of place through the contrast of grey, blue and the aggressive red of infrared film as an act of remembering the D-Day landing and the role, and the impact it had on the common people.

Lynda Laird – Dans le Noir

“The story is based on a diary of Odette Brefort, a young girl living in Deauville during the German Occupation and throughout WW2, who was a part of the French Resistance, providing military intelligence on the German defenses by drawing intricate and beautiful maps to send to her comrades in Paris. It is a 5 years diary, but I decided to narrow it down and to use only day – the D-Day landing.

I walked the coast and photographed the bunkers that formed part of the Atlantic wall along the Normandy coast from Utah beach to Deauville. They were all looking out to the sea and some of them had these paintings of trees and forests on them to disguise it.

Infrared technology was created by the military in WW2 to detect camouflage and expose a visual spectrum that is invisible to the naked eye. They used it as a means of surveillance. It is picking up anything that is alive bright red and anything that is dead, black. The vegetation reflects a large amount of infrared and the trees and the forests appeared bright red when the film was developed.

It worked quite well. But that wasn’t the plan. It was much more about the film being relevant to the work… I definitely think it’s an act of remembering to kind of get into the head space of someone that was living through it. It is something we can connect to more than the soldiers or the people that were involved in the fighting. Someone’s friend or someone’s mother to have their experience of that day, I think, is quite important.”

Blue Mitchell’s series ‘Chasing the Afterglow’ – exploring “the moon, the setting sun, and the dreamy lore that plays out under their spiritual light. The enchanted twilight hour, the magic under a blanket of stars, the visceral pull of the lunar phases – they ground us to nature but also allow us to transcend the everyday.

This work aims to inspire the viewer to reconnect with the power of nature, with a pinch of the mystic. The use of silver leaf and mixed media alters the nature of the two-dimensional photograph and creates a more all-encompassing experience. This technique accentuates the luminance of the subjects and gives the work a tactile, sumptuous quality.

Images are actualized by using the acrylic lift transfer process on a silver leafed panel. They are then coated with resin and displayed in custom painted frames.”

Dafna Talmor’s series ‘Constructed Landscapes I ‘ and “Constructed Landscape II’ – “transforms colour negatives of landscapes initially taken as mere keepsakes through the act of slicing and splicing. The resulting photographs allude to an imaginary place, idealised spaces or as Foucault states, “a virtual space that opens up behind the surface”.

Dafna Talmor – Constructed Landscapes

“I have always found limitations inspiring and so what was initially a cause of frustration and disappointment, led to the idea of merging different places of personal meaning to create idealised and utopian landscapes, of giving meaning and function to these seemingly defunct negatives. As a result, photographs taken over several years in my country of birth (Israel), where I was raised (Venezuela), across the UK (where I currently live) and the US (where my sister resides) have formed the basis of this ongoing project.

The act of physically merging landscapes from different parts of the world refers to the transitional aspect of our contemporary world in a metaphorical way. Following on from my previous work, Constructed Landscapes is interested in creating a space that defies specificity, refers to the transient and to the blurring of space, memory and time.

Passing through different locations on a regular basis points to the accumulation of memories (both individual and collective). The spaces created could be anywhere, they are ‘real’ yet virtual and imaginary; they are a conflation. One could say this conflation transforms place into space, a specific place that is initially loaded with personal meaning, memories and connotations to a space that has been emptied of subjectivity and becomes universal.”

Philip J Brittan’s series ‘Ghosts Are Real’ – expressions of colour and abstraction about feelings experienced – the sense of a vanished world – as the representation of particular places, achieved with encompassing diverse camera methods, experimental processing, a range of styles and media, and various fine-art print making techniques.

Philip J Brittan – Ghosts Are Real

“The work was created during a difficult period of my life. My mother had just died after struggling with illness for several months and dealing with the estate fractured my family in rancorous conflict. I escaped each evening for long, slow walks through the city and surrounding countryside. The night walks became a sort of haven, a place to recuperate from the troubles of the day. Memory is always associative; we recall not just the place itself but what it conjures in the mind. Walking, a different route each time, and often suddenly prompted by a particular place, I regularly experienced the emotional ambush that can arrive in the small hours with the past erupting into the present; welcome ghosts and lyrical memories alive with my time spent in the city, from child to adult – faces, voices, objects, music, walks, animals, stories.

The daytime traumas encouraged a bittersweet appreciation of the fragile wonders of the world, the sheer joy of the here and now, of life’s exquisite, magical pleasures. And pleasure and beauty, hopefully, finds visual purchase somewhere in the work – a reflection of the liberating freedom of the night walks and the revitalising time of recovery spent creating the images.”

Kim Boske’s series ‘I go walking in your landscape’ – “recording the landscape from different vantage points and at different moments to show the relationship between man and nature, and how we experience time and space. By combining these, layer over layer, into one image she tries to establish the essential quality of the changing reality; a quality that is lost in a simple, frozen image. In this way she investigates how our own movement through time and space influences our perspective on the world.”

Katrien de Blauwer’s ‘Painted Scenes’ – “Using pictures and photos from old magazines and papers she gives them a new narration that combines intimacy and anonymity. Her works resemble the procedures of photomontage or film editing, where the cut serves as a frame that marks the essential. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story. Her work deals therefore with memory. Memory by accumulation rather than by substraction.”

Atsushi Momoi’s series ‘A Light Leads To Another’ – “I’ve been inspired by my personal experience that some fragmentary memories are recalled irrelevantly, indeed it happens to all of us. These memories having utterly different contexts in time and space respond to each other as fragmental images in light and then they are about to connect with one light after another. While “past and there” which have been reconstructed and modified to suit “now and here ” remain and flicker, I recognize that my consciousness is composed of layers of memory.

Atsushi Momoi – A Light Leads To Another

In order to visualize this dynamic process about evocation, I shot my Mac display monitor which is randomly projecting the photographs taken by myself, a gathering of memories, by a function of slideshow. Not only through re-photographing incoherent images overlapped on a monitor, but also making use of the specific character of photography which is “save the memories” as a metaphor, I have tried to trace the form of consciousness derived of memory. My aim of this work is to reconsider the connection between the “past” memory and the phase of “now.”

Li Hui’s series ‘Double’ – combing images in two as a visual communication between the nature and the human’s inner sensitivity to expose neglected fleeting moments of intimacy in our lives. Focusing on visible but overlooked details like unconscious body language, fruits or flowers patterns, using analog technique of double exposure, she creates a delicate unknown world with little stories of imagination and surreal subtle beauty to overcome social constraints.